In 2000, Vladimir Putin became the president of Russia. The country started on a path towards consistently and systematically restricting political rights and freedoms. Under the guise of “fighting terrorism,” promoting “stability,” and driving GDP growth, the Russian government suppressed dissent, targeting anyone who confronted Yeltsin’s successor. This period saw the government taking over major media outlets, violently suppressing journalists, abolishing the direct elections of regional leaders, and transforming the parliament into “no place for discussion.” The authoritarian elements embedded in the 1993 Constitution, which favored the executive branch, were further strengthened during the 2000s.
Throughout these years, Russian civil society and independent politicians consistently resisted repression. In the 2000s, Russian police actively beat protesters at a Dissenters’ March and some organizations were even labeled as extremists, as was the case with Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party. By 2011–2012, it became evident that Putin had no intention of sharing power with anyone, leading to a shift in the Russian regime and its repressive measures. This soon paved the way for a period of prolonged military aggression against Ukraine and a phase in domestic politics that some analysts refer to as the “Crimean consensus.”
The Bolotnaya Square case, the first major political criminal case in the Russian Federation, marked a turning point after which civil society representatives began to quickly master new tactics and strategies of resistance. These new efforts made it possible to achieve local successes, including electoral ones, despite pressure from the authorities.
The 2010s protest movement in Russia left a significant legacy, including: the rise of a robust human rights infrastructure, mass protests nationwide, anti-corruption investigations that drew millions of viewers, a surge in independent municipal politics, and the expanded reach of independent media. Nevertheless, this was not enough to fundamentally change Russian politics. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, the political climate darkened. Mass criminal cases became more numerous, and oppositionists were pushed out of the country and imprisoned. Today we can look at this as a preparatory stage for the major war in Ukraine.
In February 2024, Alexei Navalny, the most visible oppositional politician of the 2010s, was killed in a penal colony, and a short time later in March, Vladimir Putin’s next election for the presidency of the Russian Federation took place. Opportunities to influence elections at any level within the country had nearly vanished. The repressive trend of restricting voting rights had reached a point where commentators and analysts rightly refer to Russian elections as “electoral events.” In other words, the state has ensured it can achieve the desired outcome through administrative means.
What remains of independent politics in Russia, besides diplomatic work outside? Primarily, the work performed in the media and on social networks. The Russian anti-Putin opposition has undoubtedly achieved significant success in this area. However, the rapid growth of media platforms has its downsides and negative effects, which, in my opinion, do not receive enough attention in political discourse.
First of all, politics is being reduced to the growth of social media accounts — it is becoming a purely technical task. The cult of political technologies, with its obsession with quantitative indicators, emerged in Russia a long time ago, but social media, with its unprecedented capacity for information gathering, behavioral tracking, and user targeting, opens up very different possibilities for manipulating opinion and creating the appearance of public support. In this text, I argue that such effects may turn into long-term negative trends and have a serious impact on the politically active part of Russian society in the future. Today, more than ever, we need to think about other, critical, and rational methods of public communication.
Political Media without Politics
In many respects, politics, like other spheres of life, is now “mediatized.” Here Russia is following global trends, but in the absence of public politics, the Russian opposition is much more dependent on media and social media. The Internet has become the main (often the only) space for millions of Russians to talk about politics, as well as a crucial space for opposition politicians in exile to expend their energy. Russian YouTube is highly popular, and the Russian media outlets specializing in political investigations (Project, IStories, The Insider) have much wider coverage than their Western counterparts (Reveal, Correctiv, Bellingcat). Videos by Meduza, The Insider, and Dozhd on YouTube garner more views than those of The Economist, Financial Times, The Times, as noted by the authors of a report on the state of Russian media.
Russian opposition leaders have managed to engage large audiences and construct their own media machines. Each of the dozen most popular Russian political YouTube channels is capable of regularly producing content that gets hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of views. The country lacks competitive politics, so politicians and political journalists become bloggers.
The Russian liberal opposition is not only proud of these figures, but even puts them into their political programs as an illustration of success and a forecast for the future. “These are not small or marginal figures. Moreover, this is the answer to the question of how it will be possible to quickly and qualitatively change the mood in Russia: leaders of public opinion and entire editorial boards of journalists who know how to work in a new way and share the basic values of European civilization will return from emigration,” Vladimir Milov and Fyodor Krasheninnikov write in their report.
The follower and view counts of political content creators do look impressive. Dozens of large social media accounts form a distinct and highly active opposition media environment, with its own internal conflicts — creating the appearance of political competition, despite the fact that these entities have no real access to politics.
Nevertheless, the regular audience of Russian-language independent media does not exceed 10% of all Russian adults (as seen in the JX Fund report) and is clearly smaller than the audience of television viewers (as seen in the available polling data). Opposition media do not appear to have made a major breakthrough to a new audience in the past few years and certainly have not made the kind of breakthrough that could help them affect the political situation inside Russia and the war in Ukraine.
Social media as a mechanism of separation
How does content become popular on the internet? The shortest answer is market logic. Creators of political content, especially grant-funded content, face a strange contradiction. On the one hand, they are free to produce whatever they deem necessary and socially relevant without regard to market imperatives — after all, they don’t need to make a profit to survive. On the other hand, neoliberal economic logic has so deeply permeated all areas of society that authors, editors, and managers often rely only on quantitative metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of their work.
The sociologist Christian Fuchs, a researcher of modern media and communications, notes that there are three stable imperatives at work in modern social media: superficiality, speed, and quantity. Under these conditions, media must generate as much information as possible and as quickly as possible, with the result that its quality suffers. Not surprisingly, demagoguery and conspiracy theories, including the wildest fantasies of right-wing populists, are spreading at an explosive rate in such a media environment. The general situation is eloquently illustrated by the fact that in the United States, which is considered one of the world’s most stable democracies, half of all voters express a willingness to elect a textbook demagogue to a second presidential term.
The mainstream liberal explanation for these processes is that individual far-right politicians are to blame. The way these far-right politicians interact with their supporters allegedly undermines the “normal” liberal-democratic order of things. In reality, however, the problem is systemic, as social media platforms are integrated into large market processes and form part of the global advertising market. Modern media and social networks commodify demagoguery very quickly, i.e. turn it into a commodity. The amount and speed of information dissemination helps to keep users’ attention on social media news feeds, which allows platforms to make money on advertising (which remains their main source of income).
How else to explain the enormous popularity of speakers like Valery Solovei, a Russian political scientist with nationalistic views, sharing conspiracy theories about Putin’s death? Solovei is a regular guest on Russia’s biggest political Youtube channels. Media producers and editors give Solovei airtime because they click on him, and they click on him because he has so much airtime. A vicious circle, in which the traditional function of editors as people who are responsible for the quality of materials, has become simply irrelevant. Solovei is left to YouTube’s algorithms, which do not evaluate the content of the speakers’ rhetoric, but only the clickability of the video.
The intellectual inertia of anti-Putin media opposition is striking. Media managers and entire editorial boards choose the tactic of adaptation — to work in the framework of existing genres and formats, not to try anything innovative. This line of action fits perfectly into the logic of social media platforms algorithms: to do something that sells — the most important advice heard by everyone who, for example, starts a YouTube channel. Contrary to notions of progressive technology, creativity and free market innovation, the platformization and mediatization of politics promote conservative behavior.
Academic studies have been very critical of techno-utopian notions of the Internet as a space of freedom, democracy and participation. What was thought of as a “realm of freedom” in the early days of the Internet has turned into “surveillance capitalism,” featuring mass surveillance and selling of personal data. We live in a situation wherein much of human communication, including political communication, is mediated by just a few platforms.
The modern era brings with it another (almost magical) characteristic — to turn any human activity into a commodity. Some researchers talk about “communicative capitalism,” wherein surplus value is generated not only from labor, but even from our activity on social media. According to Jodi Dean, posts, tweets, and likes are also labor. This system benefits those who aggregate large streams of user attention and data, which are then successfully sold to advertisers and other stakeholders. Political energy is being emasculated. Instead of fueling real collective action, this energy is channeled into the endless production of surplus value through views and content production.
Moreover, Dean emphasizes that in communicative capitalism, all types of content are equalized. The value of messages is no more tied to their content, but to quantitative metrics. This goes a long way towards explaining the logic of content creators. Who cares who’s on the screen and what they’re saying, as long as it brings views to speakers and individual accounts, and brings users to the platforms (whose data they may successfully sell to advertisers)? This brings us to a larger conversation about what even counts as value in today’s economy.
Media and War
The full-scale phase of the war in Ukraine enhances these negative trends. The media is now its own front of the war, and rhetoric is becoming increasingly aggressive and polarizing. Furthermore, it turns out that Russian opposition media machines may work not only against Putin, but also against, for example, supporters of Palestine (as the most popular Russian opposition media outlet, Dozhd TV, does).
While there is no space in this text for an in-depth discussion of how military conflicts impact the media, it’s important to highlight a significant trend. Since February 2022, many Russian journalists and bloggers have come to view their work as part of an information war, whether in support of or against the Putin regime. There is more political content, military reports and analytics. In Russia itself, there has been a revival of war correspondents — now it is the people who cover events on the battle fronts, supporting the actions of the Russian army. The main platform for these correspondents is Telegram, whose management remains tolerant of this kind of content, unlike YouTube. Surveys show that pro-war war correspondents are among the most popular “journalists” in Russia.
Liberal journalists, bloggers, and politicians are actively involved in this information war, with some almost entirely focusing on military conflicts. These conflicts are plural because we have witnessed the active use of partisan, propaganda-like media to justify the Israeli army’s actions in Gaza. The IDF military operation has already led to the deaths of over 38,000 Palestinians. In this context, individuals we once viewed as Russian liberal journalists, bloggers, and politicians are now dismissing fundamental liberal democratic principles. They are rejecting the work and data from the UN on the Gaza conflict, the findings of major international human rights organizations, and the reporting of their foreign journalist colleagues from reputable publications.
The influence of liberal opposition media in Russia may not be overwhelming, but it plays a significant role in shaping an alternative political agenda, even if that agenda only speaks for a limited segment of Russian society. However, the troubling shift in this agenda toward military propaganda is a cause for concern.
What if, tomorrow, Russia were to become “normal” (again)?
The issues discussed here are not unique to the Russian political landscape or Russian media. To avoid being misled by the perceived “normality” of Western democracies, it is crucial to view the situation in Russia in the context of global trends.
More than half a century ago, Jürgen Habermas introduced the concept of the public sphere, offering a pessimistic view of its decline. He chose as his ideal the bourgeois public sphere of the eighteenth century, where educated people socialized in salons and political clubs. However, by the 19th century, this sphere began to deteriorate under the pressures of profit and political control. Political parties, the state, and private interest groups gradually mastered the art of manipulating public sentiment. According to Habermas, the public sphere is losing its rational-critical function and autonomy — a process he called the “refeudalization” of the public sphere. Rather than relying on democracy and free, rational communication to solve common problems, new mechanisms of manipulation have emerged.
While Habermas’s concept has faced significant criticism, the seizure of our communication by market forces and cynical big politics remains a central concern for many intellectuals. To describe a new phase in this process, some researchers also refer to Habermas’s original concept and speak of a new refeudalization of the public sphere — only, in modern capitalism, the techniques of manipulation have become much more effective and sophisticated. In this view, politics has transformed into a form of political marketing, with the primary goal resembling that of commercial marketing: to create and maintain a loyal customer base. Consumers, in this case, must trust the brand to such an extent that it effectively makes political decisions on their behalf. Politics and civic processes are increasingly consumed by consumer capitalism and its logic, which hardly represents a move toward true democracy. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is merely a small example of the widespread trafficking of user data.
In the 20th century, another significant shift undermined democracy. A vast industry of political consultants emerged, playing an increasingly prominent role in political campaigns, with the costs of their services continually rising. Professionals from this industry now occupy many important public positions. The reasons for these processes are a topic for a separate discussion, but it is worth mentioning that politics throughout the 20th century gradually became the domain of professionals. This shift, driven by bureaucratization and the professionalization of politics, led to the alienation of citizens from political participation. Enormous state and party apparatuses, staffed by thousands of expert functionaries, have arisen.
Over time, politicians have ceased to be genuine representatives of the people, resembling instead a closed elite caste. Financiers and bankers (like Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron), political advisers (such as David Cameron and Ed Miliband), and members of political dynasties (like the Bushes, the Clintons, and Le Pen) dominate the political scene. Today, it is rare for individuals without wealth or elite education to enter institutional politics — and they often make headlines when they do.
The influence of political consultants is evident in the massive amounts spent on their services. Over $6 billion was spent on the 2012 U.S. election, with half of that amount going to political consultants. The 2018 and 2020 American elections followed a similar pattern, raising serious questions about the role of political technologists in electoral processes. But the influence of these technologists extends far beyond elections.
Another aspect of the professionalization of politics is management consulting and auditing, which private firms and individuals perform for government officials. In the UK, the ruling party has increasingly outsourced critical work within key ministries to temporary staff. Between 2018 and 2022, spending on consultants in key departments, including the Home Office and the Ministry of Defense, rose by 130% to £723 million per year.
At the same time, the opposition party, which lacks the same resources as the ruling party, receives donations from major consultancy firms. These firms pay to have their staff employed within political parties, benefiting both parties. Politicians gain free expertise, while corporate consultancies secure political connections. In 2014, Labour received more than £700,000 from PwC, Deloitte, and KPMG. However, such donations ceased between 2016 and 2020 during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, as consultants were fundamentally rejected for ideological reasons.
A Country of Extremes
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, modern political technologies came to Russia, where they were adapted to suit the local environment. Perhaps the first large-scale political event incorporating the use of large-scale modern political technologies was the 1996 presidential election — the infamous re-election of the “unelected” President Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s campaign was conducted with a huge amount of private money from all possible sources, Russian and Western: this included money from Russian oligarchs and bankers, state money, and even loans from the IMF, which were misused. The resources of Yeltsin’s headquarters were many times greater than those of his rival Zyuganov. For the first time in the new Russia, cooperation with Western consultants was as prominent as it was in the West.
This campaign was important for Russia’s most prominent political technologist, Gleb Pavlovsky. He colorfully described how he and his colleagues at the newly created Foundation for Effective Politics (FEP) generated a huge number of ideas for the Yeltsin campaign: fake newspapers (allegedly authored by the CPRF), fake leaflets with crazy slogans about the horrors of communism, and other black PR. In an interview, Pavlovsky recalls how passionate he was about the work: “I got into a wild excitement towards the end of the campaign and was probably psychologically ready even to set fire to the shop and say that the Communists had done it.”
Three years later, Pavlovsky and his FEP would become a key link in the presidential campaign of little-known silovik Vladimir Putin, whom Yeltsin appointed as his successor. The process of transferring power to Putin was a major political task, in pursuit of which Pavlovsky employed many tools that had long been mainstream in the West. First among these tools was the regular monitoring of public opinion polls and “tweaking” of the candidate’s agenda to fit the numbers. The image of Putin as a “strong leader” supported by the “Putin majority” is also attributed to Pavlovsky. The basic principles of censorship common to the Russian media, such as temniki (gag orders) for journalists, emerged amid the Putin team’s acute struggle against the opposition media outlet NTV, judging from the recollections of participants in the events. At the time, Gusinsky’s “party” NTV opposed Berezovsky’s “party” First Channel, which supported the new President Putin. The basic liberal-democratic principles of balanced reporting, impartiality and pluralism of opinion were thrown away in favor of an “us vs. them” media war.
Pavlovsky was an adviser to the administrations of three Russian presidents: Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev, until his pass to the Kremlin was revoked in 2011. By that time, the principles laid down by the political technologist had become an integral part of greater Russian politics and largely determined the direction of its development for years to come.
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In the latter half of the 2010s, Russian opposition politics began its expansion into the social media space. While there have been some clear successes in this area, the major political platforms now seem disconnected from any substantial proposals or actions. The authorities view any independent and uncontrollable political forces as a threat, whether these forces support or oppose the Russian army’s actions. Instead of fostering a competition of political ideas, this has resulted in a battle for a passive audience.
For war correspondents on Telegram, the low quality of content, propagandistic rhetoric, conspiracy theories and demagoguery might not pose a problem. However, for the democratic opposition, such a picture should look depressing and contradictory to its political ideals. All the more so, because Russian society has long ago lost trust in both independent media and independent politicians. There is a fear that, at this new historical stage, big media machines can undermine democratic processes with a level of efficiency that the architects of the 1996 presidential election and the “Buy Food for the Last Time” campaign could never have dreamed of. At the very least, the tools to do so already exist, and many media producers are already using them. These tools include top-down broadcasting instead of participation and deliberation, superficial numbers instead of serious analysis of public issues, and, finally, propaganda and the “party” format of content production.
All of this raises several critical questions. What principles will guide the functioning of media, politics, and the public sphere in the Russia of the future? In what condition will we find ourselves when we reach that point, and how can we ensure that politicized media align their interests with those of society?
